Paul Racher

Yellowjacket wasps. Total douchebags.

You MUST have something to do with it! Your picture is on it!!!! 😊🤭

‘Red tape’ professions are important for our province Legislation to boost construction jobs by undercutting skilled, knowledge economy employment is short-sighted.

My latest piece in The Hamilton Spectator. When politicians complain about “Red Tape” in the development process, we would do well to remember what it was like BEFORE we put these rules in place. (DM me if the paywall snags you).

www.thespec.com/opinion/cont...

The video 🇨🇦

Freedom to carry weapons. Freedom to say terrible things about others not like them. Freedom to limit the power of disadvantaged groups. Freedom, if understood as the ability to create fear in others, means that really only certain groups are “free” while, as a whole, society has less of it.

America seems to struggle with the tension between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” For much of the world, freedom “from” - hatred, oppression, gun violence, hunger, homelessness, fear, persecution, etc is prioritized. For Americans, especially White ones, freedom means freedom “to.”

Fascists weaponize tolerance for their own ends. Karl Popper called it the tolerance paradox. A tolerant society cannot survive unless it refuses to tolerate intolerance. Both-sides-ism. Devil’s Advocate Positions. “Prove me wrong.” It always ends in “free speech for me and not for thee.”

Of course

I bet after the 18th bahahahahahah

❤️❤️

Ford’s Bill 5 reads like Ontario’s own ‘Project 2025’ How can the 158-year-old government of Ontario decide which elements of the 13,000-year-old Indigenous archaeological legacy can be bulldozed away?

“How to Use an Emergency to Do Once Unthinkable Things”

Once some leaders start using emergencies as an excuse to run roughshod over the constitution, the strategy starts looking really attractive to others…

www.thespec.com/opinion/cont...

A political cartoon by Mike Luckovich shows three figures. On the left, a woman points angrily and says, “That’s wrong!” In the center, a wealthy man labeled “1%” wearing a suit and top hat passes a large bag marked “Campaign donation $” to a man on the right labeled “GOP,” who hands back a bag labeled “Tax cut $.” The wealthy man shouts “Socialist!” at the woman, illustrating the hypocrisy of the powerful attacking critics of corruption by using “socialist” as an insult.

They love to throw words like communist, socialist, Marxist like grenades.

Propaganda 101: make equality sound dangerous, make fairness sound radical, make compassion sound naïve.

If people ever broke free of that conditioning, they’d realize socialism isn’t the enemy, it’s perfect democracy.

I have to wonder what real news people like @jdickerson.bsky.social think about this. I suspect it would be analogous to waking up one day to find an idiot had been elected your president. Oh wait…

The “MAGA ethos” always needs an enemy - and barring that to create one. It claims strength but then whines that it is undermined by books, art, comedy, or even the law. And it requires people to believe that people who are “different” (the enemy within) are more dangerous than true adversaries. 😞

You don’t have to be an “evil genius” anymore. It turns out you can be an evil moron, as long as you’re completely ruthless.

A black-and-white cartoon featuring the Monopoly man in two poses. On the left, he runs happily clutching a giant money bag with the caption: “I’ll pay my workers as little as possible so I can make more profit.” On the right, he stands shrugging with empty pockets and a puzzled expression, with the caption: “I don’t know why people have no money to buy what I sell.”

Capitalism is designed to fail.

An economy built on exploitation always collapses under the weight of its own greed.

#socialistsunday

Every time this man takes a plane, for the rest of his life, he will have to worry that it might develop mechanical trouble and have to land in a country that recognizes the International Criminal Court.

Good.

Stable genius alert!

Yes, release the Epstein files!!!

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

You’re right. It’s our fault. Just a difference of opinion. Nothing to see here. Move along, everyone. Also. Bible, or something.

It never happened again. I’m grateful that we were neither euthanized nor harassed the authorities. My sister and I both managed to get Master’s degrees. I like to think the experience was a good motivator. Everyone has potential. Every single human life has worth - even that of blowhard TV hosts.

We spent that summer living in the bus and an old canvas tent in a day park beside the Athabasca River. The RCMP checked in on us now and again to make sure we were okay (camping wasn’t allowed there) but nobody made us leave. In August my father found work and a rental house for us. (2)

I’d like to note that my family and I were homeless over the summer of 1978. We had lost our farm so we put everything we had in a schoolbus and drove it to Athabasca, Alberta. My dad had a vague notion that he might be able to find work in the oil patch. (1)

The people renaming the USNS Harvey Milk are telling us we should fly flags half staff for Charlie Kirk out of respect.

When governments start rounding up people based on race, history has a name for it: ethnic cleansing.

America is walking a dark road.

Silence is complicity.